jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.
He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty
thousand pounds,' he said, 'on that ship, and it's for me to say
just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble
to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got
hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and
the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving-dress--
a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.
He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.
And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked up,
as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean
and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we
used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers,
who'd started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides
fairly ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it
was a curious crew, all officers and no men--and there stood the
diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort of
chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded
thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.
'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.
Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little
Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us
used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye
and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty
mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.
It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little
suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.